J. D. Salinger’s Spirit

Editor’s Note: Last Friday marked the two-year anniversary of the death of J.D. Salinger. We asked The New Yorker writer Lillian Ross if she had any thoughts:

Jerome David Salinger was an exceptional writer and an exceptional friend. No one else could make me laugh—genuinely laugh aloud—as he could. Over the telephone, all he had to do was to be himself, and I would relish going out of control with raucous giggling. His positives are familiar to Colleen O’Neill, his wife of the last several decades, to his son, Matthew, and to whatever other sacred and private relationships he had. To me, he was a generous and knowledgeable fellow-writer and friend. I miss him. He may be gone in this lifetime, but his spirit and his character are as immortal as his prose. All of the reckless clichés that are tossed around about him (“recluse,” “crank,” etc.) seem to be voiced by people who are bitter or enraged about their own frustrations. It bothered these people that they could never find Salinger participating in any pseudo-intellectual tête-à-têtes with self-appointed “literary” critics, attending social dinner parties, doing self-serving television interviews, or otherwise publicizing himself or his books. Perhaps they wanted him to be like them.

He was his own man, and I always found him to be grateful for his own inventions, the books that made it financially possible for him to live as he wished. There was not a false note in what he said or did. It came unforgettably entwined with his original humor. He was incapable of duplicity. That strong character of his—unique in my experience—was significant and instructive to me. Its influence did not end with his death.

The writing he gave us, of course, is here to stay. His books outsell those of Tolstoy and Dickens. Since its publication, in 1951, “The Catcher in the Rye” has sold about two hundred and fifty thousand copies a year. (That’s sixty-five million copies. Irrelevant fact: “War and Peace” has sold thirty-six million copies in Russia since its publication, in 1869.)

As an early colleague at The New Yorker, Salinger took enthusiastic interest in the work of other writers. He always seemed to tune into another writer’s intentions, and he was generous with his praise. In the mid-1960s, I wrote a story called “Dancers in May,” about a young public-school teacher on the Lower East Side preparing her fifth-grade class to participate in Central Park’s annual Maypole fête. Salinger appreciated each kid and the teacher, Miss White, as affectionately as he did his own creations. He wrote to me about “Dancers in May,” calling it “one of the most beautiful pieces that you or anybody else has ever done. I came away from it, of course, wanting to know how everybody is these days. How is Willy? How is Magdalena? Is the new baby all right? You would know, of course too, that Willy’s reaction to the baby hit me hard, but it’s possible that Miss O’Connor hit me even harder… It’s just one of the pieces of literature that I will always love and never forget.”

And Salinger is a writer that millions of people all over the world will always love and never forget.

Photograph courtesy of Lillian Ross.

Lillian Ross joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and worked with Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor.